Jul

How to Destroy a Hard Drive? Blend It

Erasing a hard drive. How do you do it? For home use, you don’t need to worry, but when you’re selling a computer, you really don’t want your information to stay on there in any form. I don’t care about the porn so much, but I do worry about bank details and my secret (and late) plans for the Lady’s birthday gift.

Most of us know that simply throwing files in the trash does nothing to actually erase the data from the disk. So, what’s the best way to trash them? One is to write random data over the entire drive, several times. The other is to physically shred the drive, smashing it to smithereens. Guess which one you’ll see in the video below?

OK, so we cheated. The actual video from Global Environmental Services, showing a couple of hard drives being fed into a wood chipper is sober, sensible and shows the correct way to dispose of your data. It is also excruciatingly dull. If you like, you can see it over on YouTube. Instead we stuck in an always-fun Will it Blend video, from the folks at Blendtec. They have never blended a bare drive, but this old clip of an HD-based iPod is close enough. And man, doesn’t that old white case look old?

So, there you have it. For responsible data destruction, use a blender.

Secure Data Destruction [GES]